A gun control battle in Missouri recently flooded the Centre County Sheriff's Office with concealed weapon permits from individuals living there.

The overload is due to political wrangling in Missouri over the terms of a newly enacted concealed weapons law that sheriffs in that state are not complying with because the state is not adequately funding the process.

Individuals are now applying to other states that issue permits honored in Missouri, in protest of a February state Supreme Court ruling that upheld county non-compliance.

The Centre County Sheriff's Office received about 3,000 permit applications from Missouri between late February and March 4, when officials stopped accepting new inquiries because the department could not handle the high volume of applications.

According to documentation provided by the state's Supreme Court, the Missouri Legislature enacted concealed weapons legislation in September 2003. The law directs sheriff's departments in that state to offer concealed weapons permits to qualified applicants for a maximum fee of $100. Many county offices would not issue the permits because the fee was not enough to cover the costs.

Centre County Sheriff Denny Nau said his office has issued permits to residents of other states for years, but never at the level that applications are currently being received.

Nau said a likeness of the permit he issues was recently featured on the popular pro-gun Web site www.packing.
org. That unexpected publicity, coupled with Missouri sheriffs now recommending Centre County as a place to apply for pistol permits, resulted in the overload, he added. He said he did not have an exact time that the office would catch up with the paperwork.

"The word got around and it just started snowballing out there because of the laws there," Nau said. "It will probably take us the better part of a month to get caught up."

Jim Hazen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Sheriff's Association, said county officials are aware of the problem and the actions that Nau has taken in response, but added he is unaware if a similar situation is occurring in Pennsylvania's other 66 counties. Hazen said it would be up to each individual office whether to accept the out-of-state applications and how to deal with an inundation of applications.

Nau added that once received applications are processed, the sheriff's office would begin issuing the out-of-state permits again, and attempt to streamline the processing system to handle the large volume caused by the political wrangling in Missouri.

A citizen's group filed a petition against the law, saying it violated the state constitution's right to keep and bear arms because they could not get permits to carry concealed weapons in Missouri. A lower court ruled that the new rules were unconstitutional.

But the Missouri state Supreme Court ruled Feb. 26 that the lower court erred in its decision, citing a constitutional clause that exempts concealed weapons from the document's protection of the right to bear arms.

Beth Riggert, communications counsel for the Missouri Supreme Court, said the decision is not final. The losing party has filed for a retrial, and the court would not mandate that the decision be translated into enforcement of the law until that issue is resolved.